Would I be so general if I were born, say, in a third-world war-torn country and my survival depended on my identification with an ethnic?
Even if I made that choice, if everybody around me was making life and death decisions based on ethnic identities, would it make a difference what I though about the issue. Getting killed because one is identified as an X type of person may have as much to do with other people's decisions about you than your own self-identification.
I think the general strategy really only works for people who are never going to be put in a position where their identification is never put to the test, either because of decisions the person makes or decisions somebody will make about them.
In your case, during the Cambodian revolution, intellectuals and educated people were rounded up. Many pretended to be un-educated and illiterate for fear they'd be killed for not fitting the government's new idea of a nation of simple, honest farmers. Would the force and resources of being a mathematician be so essential that you would have died rather than renounce it?
Would I stand by my Christianity if, someday, Dawkins got his way and all believers were treated like mental cases?
Who knows? It seems unlikely. I suspect we wear these identities so lightly because they come so easy. It's a decision that doesn't matter for us, so the decision seems weird when others have to make it or have it forced on them.[ Parent ]
... and my survival depended on my identification with an ethnic?
Let us suppose that you have taken on the protective colouration required by circumstances. You survive. Time passes. Now what? I see several possibilities.
For example, your sense of the importance of the individual has a cultural history. This is both a positive history - hurrah for the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement - and a negative one - welcome to being narrow-cast ideodemographic consumer, my little capitalist cog, we've got you brand of rebellion on the sale rack.
That isn't to say that it isn't a good thing ultimately, but it isn't like you plucked it out of thin air - it was part of your lucky fate to be born into a Western, first-world, democracy - and (this is just an assumption) you had the good luck to be born into a family and social class that valued education and felt it was important for you to have that opportunity. Also, you are lucky enough to live in a time and place where you can type "I don't feel British" and not fear being locked up, beheaded, or socially ostracized.
I'm not saying that your POV isn't correct. I'd agree that, on the whole, a flexible, multi-cultural identity is probably more helpful and mentally healthy. I'm not sure I'd go as far as lm and claim that an interest in world music makes you an exiled philosopher king, but it isn't a bad thing. I'm just wondering how much of the anti-package identity isn't, in fact, just a particular brand of package.[ Parent ]
One idea is that it came from science fiction fandom. The heroes are men, humans, earthlings, rather than Americans, Russians, or Chinese. Perhaps this is simply to better sell to foreign markets. Perhaps it falls out naturally from placing your drama in a inter-planetary setting. Perhaps it is actually a flaw, the "it was raining on Mongo" flaw, that fails to see that planets are big and diverse.
But however it works, reading lots of fiction which assumes (often entirely implicitly) a global culture for the apes from the third rock from the sun, does tend to free one from historic and national identities.[ Parent ]
